Do you guys have pork roll or is that a local thing for me? MMM a Taylor pork roll sandwich from their restaurant on the Wildwood boardwalk....Nice.

I picked up 10 lbs of "pork roll" from the butcher today. There's less than 9 lbs left.

The flavor is pretty close to Taylor Ham IIRC, but the texture is all wrong. The butcher has some ideas to improve the overall recipe, so I'm going to try his version next time. I'm also going to get him a sample of the real thing and let him try to duplicate it after that, so we'll revisit this recipe. The main thing I think, is going to be to grind it finer to begin with. He also wraps it in plastic instead of the cloth that Taylor uses, which has a downside - when you cook it some of the fat renders out. The plastic traps it, so after I opened each package I scraped off the congealed fat and an aspic like substance.

Then I sliced it up and pan fried it - served on an English muffin with cheddar and a fried egg - yum! So good.

The butcher was kind enough to cut it into chunks, shrink wrap, and freeze it for me since the original handoff didn't happen. Unopened packages, in this pic, you can see a blob of the congealed rendered fat on the left . . .

After slicing and pan-frying . . .

For a first try I'm super excited. This is a good enough substitute as is, but if we can get closer that will be awesome!

Yesterday I made 3 kinds of sausage - andouille, Italian, and that green chorizo recipe I posted here the other day. We had green chorizo tonight, friend up with some onions, beans, a little cumin and Mexican oregano, and served over rice. Delicious. No pics though, sorry.